Just over 20 years ago Gabriel Gate, author of 23 cookbooks and participant in countless daytime talk shows, pitched a radical idea to Channel Nine: a food show that would be broadcast at night. This was the response: “Cooking will never ever be on prime time television, because it’s just not the kind of thing that would work.”

Just over 12 years ago, Gabriel Gate pitched to SBS’s sports guru, Les Murray, the idea of a regional food segment that could be broadcast as part of the coverage of the world’s greatest cycle race, the Tour de France. This was the response: “You know Gabriel, we do sport, we don’t do cooking.” But SBS quickly came around, Gate recalls. “After a couple of years Les Murray said ‘You know what, we think it’s a great idea, so why not produce a pilot and if we like it, you go ahead.’

They don't cook, they just reheat

“So this is my tenth anniversary doing Taste Le Tour. There’s still quite a lot of cyclists saying ‘What’s cooking doing there -- we want to see more of the story behind the race, how the bikes are put together or the diet of the cyclists.’ It’s quite a privilege that a sports show has given us those four minutes at a time that is so precious, to create a kind of postcard of the culture.”

Gabriel Gate.

The commercial networks took a little longer than SBS to come around to the notion that Australians might watch cooking at night. But when they did, the phenomenon exploded. The final of MasterChef was Australia’s most watched show of 2011, and the final of My Kitchen Rules was the most watched show of 2012 and 2013.

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So has all this transformed Australia into a nation of cooks? Sadly, no, says Gate. He refers to Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules as “game shows” -- a kind of pornography, which encourages us to watch rather than do. We may know a lot more names for dishes and techniques, but we do very little with them.

“It’s fantasy, more talking than action. Just watching football on TV twice a week is not going to make you a good footballer, and it is not by watching Masterchef, even if you uindersta d what they are doing, that you are going to be a good cook.

"When we were young, people had dinner parties. Now takeaway has taken over. There is a lot less cooking at home than my generation. Ten years ago, people might have got takeaway once a week. Now lots of people almost every day get some form of food that is ready to eat. They don’t cook, they just reheat.”

He does not expect his own segments, played in the first hour of each night’s coverage of the Tour De France, to cause an outbreak of home cooking. “My main aim is to show France, the culture, a way of travelling, visit a market, see how cheese is made, taste the wine. Yes it’s nice if people cook, but it’s not the point of it. It makes you dream, it takes you away to another place.”

Gate doesn’t actually travel with the cyclists. He has to make his food segments well in advance, “When the route is announced in October, I start researching, thinking of what are the regional specialities, what wines or cheeses they make, if there’s a chef who would be interesting. Then I spend two months travelling 8,000 kilometres with a cameraman.”

This year’s tour begins in northern England, which naturally leads to the question: Do the English have a cuisine? Gate is diplomatic: "In some ways the English people are not good at promoting what they have that is fabulous -- the ingredients. When you look at the quality of their cheeses and their beef and their berries and the fishes from the cold waters, they are certainly top class."

But Gate had some trouble understanding the passion for Yorkshire pudding -- essentially just fried dough, served with drinks before the meal begins, rather than with the beef and vegetables as he’d expected.

“The Yorkshire pudding is almost like a pancake that has blown up into a cakey thing,” he says. “To some people it is stodgy, but it’s the tradition. It is not so much the flavor, it’s the texture. I think textures are something that are cultural, and it’s very difficult for people who were not born with it to understand the beauty of it.

“I’ve been a chef for 40 years and you learn that you have to open yourself to the culture, and try to understand what people like about it. It’s like Vegemite on toast -- very difficult for anybody else to love.”

Gabriel Gate’s Taste Le Tour starts on Saturday and will be on SBS1 between 10pm and 11pm every night during the Tour de France.

The Tribal Mind column, by David Dale, appears in a printed form every Sunday in The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age and also as a director's cut on this website, where it welcomes your comments.

David Dale teaches communications at UTS, Sydney. He is the author of The Little Book of Australia - A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark The Tribal Mind.